


A Rocky Field

by LaDonnaErrante



Category: Post-Biblical Jewish RPF, Zionist Galactic Federation (Tumblr)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-09-30 21:59:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10173254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaDonnaErrante/pseuds/LaDonnaErrante
Summary: A retelling of how Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus came to learn to Torah (at Yavneh II)





	

When I arrived on Yavneh II I wasn’t much more than a field hand. And yet, today, if all the seas were ink and all the reeds were quills, there wouldn’t be enough materials to write down all the Torah I have learned. My father had a bunch of fields on Olam Hazeh. People’ don’t talk about it much, because none of the great academies are planet-side, but the rabbis have to eat somehow. And my father fed them. He raised nearly all the grain that was exported to Yavneh and the smaller yeshivot of Sura 2.0 and Pumbedita II stationed around the moons on Olam Hazeh. 

As a child, all I wanted was to learn in the batei midrash. I would listen each week to the reading of the law in the synagogue with rapt attention, trying to understand what the Torah was trying to teach. But the truly great teachers rarely deigned to travel down to the planet, so beyond learning my letter with an old man in the village there was little I could gain. Each morning, I would say my morning blessings and wish that I might someday go up to Yavneh to learn Torah. 

In the years after I came to be responsible for the Law, the drudgery of ploughing made me restless. Eliezer Choleim Hakayitz, Eliezer the daydreamer my brothers would call me and send me to plow the rockiest soil. They had complained to our father, that I never finished my share of the work. Which was true enough, I’d often get stuck on the beauty of the verses that I would repeat. Each day as my hand guided the iron ox, ploughing the hard ground, I would repeat the verses that I’d heard that week, as best I could, trying to not to make a single mistake. The words were exhilarating, sometimes it seemed as if the earth was parchment and the seas were ink and the Holy One Blessed Be had inscribed everything with the words of Torah. And I yearned to read the world in this way. One morning I was plowing in this field of stones, and contemplating the verse, “And they took him and cast him into a pit” and I sat down on the ground and began to weep for the hatred Joseph’s brothers must have had for him and for the hatred my own brothers had for me. My father came into the field and he asked me, “My son what is wrong?” 

I answered him, “I want to learn Torah.”

“And for this a man of twenty-two is crying?! For shame. Go plow in the third field where the soil is soft and where you will not be so vexed.” 

But I could not move, the tears only filled my eyes again, and I wished for nothing more than to disappear from the field and appear high above the planet, on Yavneh II. “Father, I am going to learn. There isn’t anything you can do.” 

“Is that how you think this family works?! You won’t get another bite to eat from me until this whole field is plowed. I don’t want to hear another word about Yavneh.” 

He shouldn’t have left me alone after that. But he never was very clever. And so, after had gone away, I ran the iron ox over a particularly large stone, big enough to jam the works. Having broken it, I slunk away, off the property and into the village where I bartered my way onto a transport bound for Yavneh II, nothing in my possession besides a sack of dirt. And so, it began, though I have carried away no more Torah from my teachers than a man who dipped his finger in the sea.

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**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on several aggadot (rabbinic stories) about the tannaitic rabbi Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus.


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